Mole claims that the iPhone SE will be marked as iPhone 16E this year.

A leak with a mixed career reported that the new iPhone SE this year will receive an updated name to honor its new design: the iPhone 16E.

We expect that the budget model of this year will be the largest ever and ultimately bid farewell to the large Chinese market with the Home button, reimagining it based on the modern form factor of the iPhone 14.

I have an iPhone SE.

The iPhone SE was developed by Apple as a cost-effective entry point into the corporate ecosystem. The first model was based on the iPhone 5s in 2016, a classic design that stood the test of time.

The company focused on pricing the model affordably, while some of us were technologically downgraded and moved away from flagship iPhones before opting for either the compact size or the slanted frame (at a time when Apple was in its rounded corner phase), or both features.

The 2020 model was based on the iPhone 8, the last flagship device with a Home button. The 2022 version was a very minor update from there and is still being sold today. But more than seven years after Apple changed its iPhone design language with the iPhone X, the iPhone SE 3 now looks very outdated.

The iPhone SE 4, or the iPhone 16E

This model promises to change that this year. Based on the iPhone 14, it will offer for the first time a design feature that is much more in line with current and latest flagship models. Although it will have a notch instead of a Dynamic Island, it will differ from its predecessor by day and night.

The leak Majin Bu suggests that the new design could also have a new name: the iPhone 16E, possibly styled as iPhone 16🄴.

Based on my source's reporting, it seems that Apple will not present the new iPhone in 2025 as the iPhone SE4, but rather as the iPhone 16E. It should have a design similar to the iPhone 14 with an OLED screen and an Action button. The available colors are white and black.

Majin Bu was right about the sand-colored iPhone 16 Pro and also about the vertical arrangement of the camera setup in the basic model iPhone 16 – although the latter had already been reported by other sources at that time.

But they have also made other mistakes, like different colors for the iPhone and interchangeable magnetic tips for the Apple-Pencil.

The design is naturally widespread and considered given. The colored instructions simply correspond to the current model (which also has a VERSION(ROT) version).

One could argue that such a large update in a new name would be out of place, but the iPhone 16 brand for an older design might be confusing – especially if it is introduced after the rest of the product line. For now, we are considering this with a relatively low degree of skepticism.

Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplas